“Here we go,” he said.
“You have any Sig P220s in here?” I got up, too.
“One. It should be on the rack with the other forty-five auto loads.”
While He mounted his test-fire cartridge case on the microscope’s stage, I walked into a room that was either a nightmare or toy store, depending on Your point of view.
Walls were boards crowded with pistols, revolvers, and Tec- I Is and Tec-9s. It was depressing to think how many deaths were represented by the weapons in this one cramped room, at how many of the cases had been mine.
The Sig Sauer P220 was black, and looked so much like the nine-milfirneter carried by Richmond police that at a glance I could not have told them apart. Of course, on close inspection, the .45 was somewhat bigger, and I suspected its muzzle mark might be different, too.
“Where’s the ink pad” I asked Frost as he leaned over the microscope, lining up both cartridge cases so he could physically compare them side by side.
“In my top desk drawer,” he said as the telephone rang.
“Towards the back.”
I got Out the small tin of’ fingerprint ink and unfolded a snowy clean cotton twill cloth, which I placed on a thin, soft plastic pad. Frost picked up the phone.
“Hey, Bud. We got a hit on DRUGFIRE,” he said, and I knew he was talking to Marino. “Can you run something down?”
He proceeded to tell Marino what he knew. Then Frost said to me as he hung up,
“He’s going to check with Henrico even as we speak.”
“Good,” I abstractedly said as I pressed the pistol’s barrel into the ink, and then onto the cloth.
“These are definitely distinctive,” I said right off as I studied several blackened muzzle marks that clearly showed the combat pistol’s front sight blade, recoil guide and shape of the slide.
“You think we could identify that specific type of pistol?” he asked, and he was peering into the microscope again.
“On a contact wound, theoretically, we could,” I said.
“The obvious problem is that a forty-five loaded with high performance ammunition is so incredibly destructive, you aren’t likely to find a good pattern, not on the head.”
This had been true in Danny’s case, even after I had conjured up my plastic surgery skills to reconstruct the entrance wound as best I could. But as I compared the cloth to diagrams and photographs I had made downstairs in the morgue, I found nothing inconsistent with a Sig P220 being the murder weapon. In fact, I thought I might have matched a sight mark protruding from the margin of the entrance.
“This is our confirmation,” Frost said, adjusting the focus as he continued staring into the comparison microscope.
We both turned at the sound of’ someone running down the hall.
“You want to see?” he asked.
“Yes, I do,” I said as vet another person ran past, keys jingling madly from a bell.
“What the hell?” Frost looked up, frowning toward the door.
Voices had gotten louder outside in the hall, and now people were hurrying by, but going the other way. Frost and I stepped outside the lab at the same moment several security guards rushed past, heading for their station. Scientists in lab coats stood in doorways casting about. Everyone was asking everyone else what was going on, when suddenly the fire alarm hammered overhead and red lights in the ceiling flashed.
“What the hell is this, a fire drill?” Frost yelled.
“There isn’t one scheduled.” I held my hands over my ears as people ran.
“Does that mean there’s a fire?” He looked stunned.
I glanced up at sprinkler heads in the ceilings, Frost said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I ran downstairs and had just pushed through doors into the hall on my floor when a violent white storm of’ cool halon gas blasted from the ceiling. It sounded as if I were surrounded by huge cymbals being beaten madly with a million sticks as I dashed in
and Out of rooms. Fielding was gone, and every other office I checked had been evacuated so fast that drawers were left open, and slide displays and microscopes were on. Cool clouds rolled over me, and I had the surreal sensation I was flying through a hurricane in the middle of an air raid. I dashed into the library, the restrooms, and when satisfied that everyone was safely out, I ran down the hall and pushed my way out of the front doors. For a moment, I stood to catch my breath and let my heart slow down.